In defense of adverbs

  (This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

I'm not much on wrangling over writerly advice. It often seems a pointless exercise. So why get down into the trenches over adverbs here? First because the eight parts of speech are my favorite parts of speech. Second, because I'd like to make a larger point about the word "never" when it comes to doling out advice. A common sense argument, if you will, from someone who has never considered common sense a common attribute among people.

"I seem to be a verb" is Buckminster Fuller's famous declaration. I'll go him one better. I seem to be an adverb. Which is to say, a jack of all trades. For I am not merely an action, a process, I’m a constantly recalibrating and refining process, and this is the definition of a well-used adverb. Yes, "I go through life hurriedly" can be replaced by "I rush through life", but can be further refined as "I rush through life precipitously" or even ""I rush through life precipitously whole heartedly." With nuance come adverbs.

Adverbs are not just the despised -ly words. Here's an adverb for you: here. And there. And everywhere--all adverbs. Of the five journalistic questions, when, what, where, why, and how, adverbs answer four. As a matter of fact, those four are adverbs.There are adverbs of manner, of place, time, degree, frequency, conjunctive, interrogative, and relative adverbs. There are even focusing adverbs. What the hell tis his Pandora's box of adverbs? 

Let's have a quick look.

Review: Falls to Pieces

(This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

When we think of Hawaii we're apt to picture a lush landscape of surfer-size waves, with green palms shading flower-bedecked hula dancers. That's not the setting of Falls to Pieces, where a savage jungle landscape is at war with developers who would pave paradise and put up a parking lot. It's a foe to be respected by Kati Dawes and her daughter Zoe, who have gone off grid and incognito on the island of Maui, hoping to escape their past. But the past catches up, with devastating results. Author Douglas Corleone spells it out at one point: Paradise is safe only in designated places.

When the story opens, two murders have already occurred, driving the plot forward with the fury of Fates. Kati has the unfortunate habit or luck of putting her welfare in the hands of  treacherous men, so when the kidnapping which is  the axle of this novel takes place, suspects are thick on the ground. Beware: no one in this novel. and I mean absolutely no one, is to be trusted. And Kati's memory is not what it was before she sampled the pharmacopeia from Ativan to Zoloft.

Christmas v. Easter

(This post is available in audio format  here on Youtube.) "Imagine this. It's Christmas Eve and you have to wrap all your own presents. And that's supposed to be a lot of fun. Even though your presents are all underwear and socks. You know that, because you're the person wrapping them. And on Christmas morning, your presents aren't under the tree. You have to go outside and root around in the bushes to find them before the neighbor kids snatch them up.

And when you tear off the wrapping paper, all you've got is underwear and itchy socks.

That's Easter. Am I wrong?

Also, imagine instead of Christmas parties and Advent calendars  and Christmas carols, you have to give up everything you like and eat a ton of fishsticks all through Advent. That's Easter.

Easter: the one day we celebrate man-made ecological disaster by hiding hard-boiled eggs around the neighborhood and then forgetting where, so they're like little IEDs.

Review: The Wildes

(This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.) The Wildes seems at first blush to promise a very intimate tale of a very public man, something along the lines of Louis Bayard's earlier novel Courting Mr. Lincoln. until we realize at what point we've been dropped into this tale. The story begins just before what most people would consider The End of Oscar Wilde: not his death, but his death-in-life, the accusations, the trial for slander, and the consequences. This story could be called the aftermath of Oscar. Oscar, in life always at center stage, must give up the spotlight on this occasion. This time, the walk-ons speak.

The story begins with an idyll, a brief time snatched from time in an Edenic inglenook of Norfolk where the Wildes, along with sundry supporting characters, have decamped, ostensibly to give Oscar the peace necessary to finish his latest play, although other motives are at play. And the novel keeps returning to that time, those events, that last weekend in particular, trying to make sense of it all, of how the family was cast out of Eden forever, when they might have stayed.

Jules Feiffer on writing

 (This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

"Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw."

--Jules Feiffer 

Jules left us in January. Cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter. Illustrator of The Phantom Tollbooth. Winner of the Pulitzer prize for editorial cartooning. Inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame.

Review: The Shotgun Approach

  (This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

You've got to keep an eye on William Martell. He's a master of misdirection. He lays out the evidence fairly but sneakily in each of his novelettes (novellas? long short stories?).

The Shotgun Approach concerns a formerly hit music duo with more than a passing resemblance to Hall and Oates, except the frontman has had his blonde head blown off with a shotgun and his partner is the prime suspect, along with the victim's ex-wife and his former producer, who all, by odd coincidence, are checked into the same VIP floor of the same luxury hotel on the night of the murder.

Hosting the proceedings are a burnt-out San Francisco police detective and her latest partner, who's been assigned the unenviable task of making sure she doesn't kill anyone. No one has had any luck in that department so far.